Their parents, Vincent and his beloved wife, went on a business trip. The plane went down over the ocean. No survivors. The fortress had fallen.
The relatives, vultures who had always circled the periphery of the Velthane wealth, descended. They were not family; they were hounds, leeching onto the property, the accounts, the assets.
With slick lawyers and forged documents, they stripped everything, siphoning the billions into a new, grotesque entity they called the Azure Mergers. They left Aelion and Celastine with nothing but the hollowed-out Velthane name and the empty mansion.
It was then that the dynamic solidified forever. Celastine, with her fire and determination, became the public face, the fierce young CEO who fought the world with a smile. Aelion, from his wheelchair, in the shadows of his study, became the mind. The strategist. The ghost of his father, whispering moves in a corporate chess game. Slowly, painstakingly, they began to claw it all back.
As their empire regrew, Aelion deliberately faded into obscurity. Let the world see Celastine Velthane, the prodigy. He preferred the shadows. It was safer there.
She learned, she grew, she became capable of making her own decisions, though he was always there, a safety net she both relied on and raged against.
Then, when he was twenty, a new world opened. The VR game Legend of Dungeons was released. It wasn't just a game; it was a global phenomenon, a second reality.
It was a world where your physical body meant nothing. Only your mind, your will, and your skill mattered. Even the mysterious, all-powerful "Council," the rumored arbiters of global power, formed their own elite team within the game.
For Aelion, it was a salvation. A reprieve. In the digital dungeons of Legend of Dungeons, he wasn't Aelion Velthane, the crippled heir. He was a legend.
His strategic mind, his preternatural reflexes—unshackled from his broken body—found their true medium. He climbed the ranks with a relentless, silent fury, until he stood alone at the very top. The number one ranked player in the world.
The blue glass of the pod seemed to shimmer, the memory of digital battles fading back into the silent, sterile reality of his study. The hum of the pod was a lonely sound.
He was the king of a digital realm, yet a prisoner in his own home, his only confidante a sister whose love for him was a beautiful, terrifying maze from which neither could escape.
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The familiar, electric tingle of neural integration subsided, and the virtual world resolved around him in a cascade of shimmering pixels.
The sterile silence of his pod was replaced by the deep, ambient hum of a sacred space. Aelion stood, his digital avatar a perfect, unblemished reflection of his former self—tall, powerful, and whole.
Before him, a solitary flight of stairs ascended into an ethereal gloom. They were carved from a material that seemed to be solidified moonlight, each step humming with immense, latent power. This was it.
The staircase to the 100th Floor. A place no player, not even the rumored teams sponsored by the omnipotent 'Council,' had even glimpsed. They were still scrambling, miles below, dissecting his clever decoys on the 94th Floor, chasing ghosts while he stood at the summit.
A slow, fierce grin spread across Aelion's face, a expression that felt more natural here than any he wore in the real world. 'This is it.
The pinnacle. The one place where nothing is broken.' Here, there was no wheelchair, no pitying glances, no legacy of loss. There was only the challenge, pure and unconquered.
With a deep, steadying breath that was pure instinct, he set his foot on the first step.
The universe detonated.
A blinding, annihilating light erupted from the step itself, consuming him utterly. It was not heat or sound, but pure information, a torrent of code and energy that scoured his digital soul.
For a moment, his consciousness fragmented, his senses overloading—a million colors, a symphony of screams and static, the sensation of falling through infinite dimensions.
Then, as suddenly as it began, it ceased.
His vision cleared, his senses snapping back into hyper-sharp focus. He was no longer on the staircase. The grin returned, sharper now, edged with anticipation. He was in a colossal, circular arena. The ground was polished obsidian, reflecting a starless, void-black sky above. The air was cold and still, charged with a palpable, ancient magic.
In the center of the arena, exactly ten paces before him, was a dais. And upon that dais, a throne. It was not ornate, but stark and formidable, hewn from a single, massive piece of a dark, crystalline material that seemed to drink the light around it. This was the goal. The Seat of the Dungeon King.
Between him and the throne were ten steps, each one a plateau of the same polished obsidian. He understood instinctively. These were not steps to be merely climbed. Each was a trial. A gate.
He approached the first step and, without hesitation, placed his boot upon it.
The world warped.
The arena vanished. He now stood on a vast, perfectly transparent plane of glass that stretched to infinity in all directions. Below his feet was an endless, churning abyss of blue-white mist and jagged, glacial peaks far, far below. The air here was frigid, biting at the exposed skin of his avatar, each exhale forming a cloud of frost.
And before him, materializing from a swirl of coalescing ice crystals, was his opponent.
A wolf. But no natural beast.
It was sculpted from living, glacial ice. Its form was massive, larger than any dire wolf, its body a complex lattice of razor-sharp facets and hoarfrost.
Its eyes were not eyes, but two pits of absolute, burning cerulean light. As it solidified, the very air around it grew colder, and a low, deep-throated growl emanated from its chest. It was a sound like mountains grinding together, a promise of primordial cold and shattering force.
The growl resonated through the glass plane, a vibration Aelion felt in his bones.
Aelion's grin didn't just widen; it transformed into a thing of pure, unadulterated joy. A hunter's smile. The smile of a man who had faced the absolute worst the real world could offer and found a digital wolf to be a welcome reprieve.
'No health bar. No nameplate. Just a pure, environmental boss. A test of adaptability.' His mind, the mind that had rebuilt a corporate empire from the shadows, began to work, analyzing, calculating. The ice. The cold. The transparent terrain.
He shifted his weight, his hand instinctively reaching for the hilt of the void-black longsword materializing on his back. The ice wolf paced, its crystalline claws ticking against the glass, each step leaving a temporary frostmark.
Aelion's fingers splayed, and the air itself seemed to warp and condense, obeying his will.
With a sound like a sharp intake of breath, a blade of darkest obsidian materialized in his grasp, its edge humming with latent power. He willed it, and the sword answered.
Runes along the flat of the blade ignited, and flames, pure and violent, erupted down its length, casting flickering, monstrous shadows across the infinite glass plane. The heat was a palpable wave, pushing back against the wolf's aura of absolute zero.
He didn't run; he shot forward, a blur of motion propelled by the very game mechanics he had mastered. The Ice Wolf, a creature of instinct and glacial fury, lunged to meet him, jaws of diamond-sharp icicles snapping shut on the space where his head had been a microsecond before.
Aelion twisted in mid-air, a move impossible in the world of flesh and bone. He brought the flaming sword down in a devastating arc, not aiming for the fortified skull or the armored spine, but slicing deep into the creature's seemingly unprotected abdomen.
The sensation was profoundly visceral. The blade met resistance—a tough, leathery hide—then parted it with a sizzling tear. Not blood, but a torrent of super-cooled, azure liquid gushed from the wound, splashing across Aelion's hand and forearm.
His triumph was instantaneous and short-lived. A searing, paralyzing cold, far worse than any natural frost, flash-froze across his gauntlet. The liquid wasn't blood; it was the wolf's very essence, a cryogenic venom. The ice crawled up his wrist, locking his joints, threatening to claim his entire arm. 'A trap. Its weakness is a defense. Brilliant.'
The wolf's agonized howl ripped through the arena, a sound of shattering glaciers that vibrated through the glass beneath their feet. Its cerulean eyes blazed not just with fury, but with raw, intelligent pain.
With a grunt of effort, Aelion flared the flames wreathing his sword. The fire roared, concentrating into a white-hot inferno around his imprisoned hand. The ice resisted for a heart-stopping second before yielding with a violent crack and a burst of steam. He wrenched his arm free, leaping back to create distance, his mind already recalculating.
And then, something within him broke loose. The near-loss, the shock of the pain, the primal scream of the beast—it wasn't fear that answered.
It was a dark, exhilarating thrill. His eyes, in the avatar's digital face, shifted from their usual focused amber to a deep, glowing crimson.
His heartbeat was a war drum in his ears, a powerful, frantic rhythm that drowned out all other thought.
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